There’s the
heating costs, the constant repairs, the seemingly endless battle to keep it
clean. After a while this, plus your ties to one particular plot of land, can
focus your thinking to such a level of obsession that it seems far more likely
that the house owns you than that you own the house.

Now consider
if your house was built in 1647 and was, until the day you moved in, owned and
occupied by only one family. With that much history on its foundation, the house
truly has the upper hand.

Such is the
story of the Messers and the Hatches — Sarah Messer, author of Red House, is a
member of only the second family ever to call her childhood house their home.
Messer’s parents bought the house — a colonial in Marshfield, Mass. — from
Richard Warren Hatch, the distant heir of Walter Hatch, the house’s builder and
first owner. Unlike the cutesy or grand versions of a colonial-style house made
in more recent years, the 1647 version is less a set, pre-designed structure and
more a living, growing organism. From only a few rooms, a sprawling house of
rooms squeezed in between rooms and ancient cellars surrounded by an odd
collection of outbuildings is slowly created. As the sons of Walter Hatch and
their children and assorted relatives move into the house, it expands — with
necessity, not grace or architectural beauty in mind—and goes through periods of
both decay and repair. The house catches fire several times in its history —
including at least twice while the Messers live there — and seems far more prone
to discord than it does to tranquility.

Red House is a
tale of three entities: the Hatch family, the Messers and the house itself. The
Hatch family came to Massachusetts from Kent, England. They were farmers on the
large plot of land originally purchased by Walter Hatch but as that land was
whittled away through inheritances to different sons the Hatches looked for
other forms of occupation; some of them wrote, some went to war, some ended up
leaving the house and Marshfield for good. But enough Hatches stuck around,
perhaps because of the house more than the surrounding town, to see the house
through the 1960s.

The Messers
are almost as sprawling and disorganized as the house that came to possess them
as much as they possessed it. Sarah’s father had been married before he met her
mother and he had four children by his first wife and then another four with
Sarah’s mother. The resulting family of eight would swell to include boyfriends,
girlfriends, husbands, wives and grandchildren — all who would live in, visit
and occasionally help fix up the Red House.

And the Red
House, the true star of this tale, seems forever to need fixing yet never
completely falls apart. The house, like so many things in this part of the
world, witnesses a variety of changes but seems solid and determined to exist,
though not always thrive, forever.

Like
legends about your own family, Red House is an entertaining yarn that is at its
best when describing adventures of either the immediate nuclear family (Messers)
or the very first Hatches. The historical tales offer an entertaining window
into life in early New England while the stories from Messer’s own childhood are
interesting like the memories of an old friend.
—Amy Diaz